Twelve minutes, five segments. One place, built one sense at a time — the order matters, because sight alone doesn't hold anyone.
Settling
1 min 30[light and easy — you're inviting, not instructing]
This is a visualization. We'll build one place together, slowly, and then stay in it for a while.
A note before we start, because it stops people giving up in the first minute: a lot of us don't see pictures when we close our eyes. If you don't, you're not doing it wrong. Some people get a sense of a place rather than an image, and that works just as well. Take whatever comes. [pause for 10 seconds]
Get comfortable. Let your eyes close. Two slow breaths to arrive. [pause for two full breaths]
The place — sight
2 min 30[name a few fixed details and let them fill the rest; over-describing crowds the listener out of their own picture]
You're standing at the edge of a clearing in a wood, late in the afternoon. [pause for 15 seconds]
The clearing is roughly round, and about as wide as a house is long. Grass in the middle, long and pale. Trees all the way around, close together at the edges and thinning where you came in.
The sun is low, coming in almost sideways through the trunks, so the light arrives in bars across the grass with shadow between them. Where it lands the grass looks almost white. [pause for 20 seconds]
There's a fallen tree along one side, mossed over on the top. That's where you're going to sit, in a minute. [pause for 20 seconds]
Sound, air, ground
3 min 30[one sense per paragraph, in order — this is the segment that turns a picture into a place]
Now listen. Wind moving in the tops of the trees — it arrives, builds, and passes over, and then the clearing is quiet again. [pause for 20 seconds]
Underneath that, birds. Not many, and not close. One somewhere behind you, answering another one further off. [pause for 20 seconds]
Now the air. It's cooler in here than it was on the path, the way woodland always is. Where the sun reaches you it's warm on one side of your face and cool on the other. [pause for 25 seconds]
And it smells of leaf mould and warm bark, and something green underneath. [pause for 20 seconds]
Now the ground under your feet. Soft, giving slightly, years of leaves pressed down. Walk across to the fallen tree and sit down on it. Feel the moss under your hands, damp and cool, and the hard wood underneath. [pause for 30 seconds]
Staying
3 min[stop adding detail here — the work is done, and every new sentence now takes something away]
Now stop building it. Just be there. [long pause — 60 seconds]
Nothing is going to happen in this clearing. Nobody is coming. There's nothing to find here and nothing to do. That's what it's for. [long pause — 60 seconds]
The light is dropping a little further. The bars across the grass are getting longer. [pause for 40 seconds]
Coming back
1 min 30[bring the voice up over the last three lines; the point of the last one is that the place is portable]
In a moment we'll leave, but the clearing stays exactly as it is. You can come back to it tonight, or next week, and the fallen tree will still be there. [pause for 20 seconds]
Now let the picture go, and come back to the room you're actually in. The chair. The floor. The sounds in the building. [pause for 15 seconds, then lift the voice]
Move your fingers. Take a deeper breath. And when you're ready, open your eyes.